aaron peacock -> RE: Learning: Concert Flamenco as differentiated from Flamenco Puro, the folkloric corpus (Feb. 3 2021 10:55:15)
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ote: Is it just my imagination or is there a subtle subtext to all these threads about improv that's essentially "don't expect to make something up out of nowhere and have it sound like (ie "be") flamenco"? Nothing subtle about it. I love improvisation, and composing. When I do it in a proper flamenco context, I know darn well how to make it “sound flamenco” but the simple fact remains, when a flamenco player IS improvising on the fly, it is easy to tell, and not for “good” reasons. I will do it during say a long escobilla but that’s only because I am too lazy to prepare appropriate music for that section. Sure my improvisation might yield some good ideas for serious falsetas, but I know the truth that is is a cop out full of plenty of throw away material. Some guys might think their improvisations are as good as their compositions or whatever, good for them, but it is wrong to give students the idea that THAT is the normal way or appropriate way to approach flamenco and creativity with in it. I don’t want to get into it, but since you mentioned “licks”, well, jazz or indian classical, you name the genre, are not much different in this regard. There needs to be a basis. But out of all these genres the “licks” that constitute “flamenco falsetas” are generally longer passages than the musical devices (licks) in other music styles that use improvisation. and it was precisely this sort of response that I was hoping to elicit since day one. the recognition that there are 2 hats: the creator and the editor. the editor cannot create. the creator must spew. they must alternate in some Socratic Hegelian dialectical process... creativity is available upon demand, but the editor must STFU until it's time to weed out stuff... perfectionism is the enemy of the creative process if it arrives at the moment of birth, as nothing in this world comes out fully formed. we start vaguely, we approximate, we refine, all human activities are iterative processes. original ideas don't just pop out fully formed but are the result of experimenting, mixing and modifying existing things etc., One discovers falsetta-worthy material through noodling around, one edits and discards and hones. Now, each existing traditional flamenco falsetta represents an opportunity to transform it, make it ones own! One may also accidentally discover a famous falsetta merely by arpeggiating some flamenco chord shapes! (I'll be happy to illustrate some time if you ever want to laugh at my bad playing) so, some of this is simply emergent from the instrument and idiomatic chord shapes and that funny reverse arpeggio thing lol. By the same token, it's very difficult to do the same thing precisely the same way twice. There's also the human game of telephone. There are also differing expectations on "perfect repertory performing empty vessels" vs "humans who are expected to have their own style" etc... Clearly you are cognizant of the perspective I've been struggling to bring here, and I see in many threads that you are familiar enough with differing musical modalities (not in the tonal/modal sense, lol... like ways of approach) in that you reference baroque ornamentation as differentiated from jazz improvisation. One thing: there's ALWAYS a structure, "give me a fast hard-swinging II-V-I" or "it's a 12 bar blues" etc... a "head" or principle signature set of melodies that make a SONG a song, is like a falsetta. even FREE JAZZ has structure. It turns out that it's difficult to deliberately consistently turn out bad music, who knew. Perhaps there really IS some Calvinistic "pre-destination" here, and I must add that Jazz is one of our flagship "improv based music" and it is NOT purely improvisatory, as we note. The chord progression, etc, harmonic dictatorship yikes! yet you can still create. creation happens. It's to be encouraged, not shamed into a corner. I'm pointing out group attitudes that MUST be fixed if one truly loves flamenco and wants it to survive. (I hear you on conformist culture generally over here...) so, I wasn't sure if you were invoking some Calvinistic "pre-destination" argument as if the structure of a flamenco palo leaves one no room for authentic improv, or what... NOW I SEE, that you simply differentiate between a refined composed product and improvisation, which, while possible, is not what leads to show-ready results. Well, I'll admit that my flamenco improv is not as good as some of the ideas I've pulled out of it and refined. I also enjoy the process and enjoy hearing the process. I will pay good money to hear skilled artists improvise and possibly fall down or make mistakes! I'm ok with this concept. I'm also quite openly NOT AS GOOD A PLAYER as you, Ricardo. If I had your skill level, I'd been unstoppable. I'm already pretty hard to stop and I'm terrible, just wait til I'm even "not half bad"... LOL Can you understand where I see an issue in the flamenco culture as propagated here in such a fashion with regards to the possibility of future flamenco that doesn't sound like endlessly living in the picado-dominated shadow of Paco de Lucia, who, while brilliant, is only one branch of the flamenco evolutionary tree... I read a recent interview with José Mártos, a Venezuelano living in Spain and who is highly sought-after as an accompianist these days. It made me sad to read that despite being extremely formed educated and an extremely cultured player, that he said that he did not "YET" have his own sound. This is not something you can add in later! ones OWN sound is the result of ones own human frailties, ones own reductionist-engine at work, ones own mistakes and weaknesses and personality present when one tries to do something. A TOTAL BEGINNER has their own style and can stay true to it! THIS is something I know, and don't merely think. I promise to represent this idea until the day I die as it's important to me. I wish to pass this on to young people more than any other thing: one can certainly always improve ones technique, but one is foolish to discard ones innate tendencies. Ones innate laziness is a GIFT as NO ONE else can cut that corner like YOU can! One makes mistakes in trying to perfectly copy something, paying attention to those mistakes will be fruitful in ones future. One is learning a piece, a tiny passage of it catches your fingers and you want to roll it in another direction- humor this instinct and mine it later for content. BTW: Ricardo, as a perpetual beginner since childhood, I've actually developed a methodology for learning "generalisms" and avoiding literally learning others songs, and I've done this deliberately for my own goals which I tried to explain. Humans essentially optimize for a given social game. We sit at a table and people are playing an unfamiliar card game. We want to know the RULES, how do you play this unfamiliar game? Derive a general set of principles about an activity and then try/fail and then find out more about the structure and why try/fail produced the results it produced. "teach a man to fish" vs "give a man a fish" I'm a BIG proponent of meaning-based-learning. Teaching the structure. CAN one learn about fish anatomy after processing 1000 of them? Yes. That's valuable experience. CAN someone point out some skeletal structures and key organs and speed up your process? yes. I did, in fact, look up how to conjugate 10 Russian verbs for I, you, we, they, and THEN set about learning and it went faster than a persons 2-3 years needed to learn to talk as a baby. It turns out that PIE grammatical structure assists in latinic/slavic learning (less so with English, as Bill noted) I looked at a map in my friends toilet in Moscow and it said Афганистан where I knew Afghanistan to be, and Йран where I knew Iran to be, so it wasnt' long before I had some basic comprehension of Cyrillic and this became a tool for further learning. One bootstraps from existing abstractions, however particularly wrong they may turn out to be from later detailed examination. (it turns out that many etymological changes are hidden from native speakers in most languages due to spelling and pronunciation changes over time, it's more obvious to a n00b) End of the day: one is deriving the abstractions one filters the worlds stimuli via. one is honing mental models. one doesn't directly apprehend the world, but through ones senses. humans primary tool is: "reductionism" because it's impossible to mentally model the universe in it's entirety without some sensory or locational bias, even time/space relativity would affect efforts at simultaneous apprehension of "it all"... I'm not personally seeking to emulate PDL nor his music and thus, it's not an applicable approach. Have I learned from his music already by listening to it? Yes, immensely. I don't want to hear his music in my head when I hold my guitar. I must add that Paco de Lucia is hardly canonical flamenco, it's wild modern interpretations, avante-garde, far reaching. It's great, but you don't need to learn PDL to learn flamenco music, 2 different things there... I was commenting previously that PDL appears to substitute for the word flamenco in much of the popular imagination, and this is not correct, surely you can agree or see what i mean there? (I mean his original later works, not "traditional" early PDL) I have an entire corpus of semi-original flamenco noodle that resembles flamenco but I've never learned one song of others. Will this lead me to nowhere? Will this approach fail me? I'm not seeking a career playing flamenco guitar. I enjoy making jaleo and listening to others. I enjoy playing. I found it odd that autodidacts that can learn elaborate pieces by ear don't extract structural information from said pieces to then generalize with. Of course they do! and now I KNOW that this structural information has been processed. I've been reading some of the interesting harmonic theory threads here and it's clear that you know precisely about the generalisms I speak of. I've been earnest (not trolling) since day one. I suppose the technical term is that I am a weirdo. Chester, you really nailed it. One must drink the water, swim in it, immersion. There's no simple shortcut "formula" Ricardo, you also quite nailed the adherence to conformity in Euro-Latinic culture, for which nothing new ever exists but as combos of previous editions.... partial truth lies in this observation, but I prefer American Ingenuity, LOL (there's that word again. Strikingly similar to "inspiration", which of course is directly tied to breathing, etymologically...) (side note, it took rural rednecks to invent a plural "you" for English!?) I suppose what is missing is a discussion of what personal hardships endured can make one more soulful or play with more immediacy.. "the sensation that death is a possibility"... the knowledge of how short life is... these all surely inform harmonic choices, as even given limited tools a delta bluesman like Robert Johnson can send shivers up ones spine. Ramon Montoya got his first guitar at 18 or something was it? He picked up some stuff in the cafés I guess? I completely comprehend the inevitability of idiomatic passages in flamenco, and the "tyranny of the structure" I merely suggest that one is more free inside this context that it's made out to be...
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